Posts in category Open Education Consortium

This year, three TU Delft courses have won Awards for OpenCourseWare Excellence from the world-wide Open Education Consortium. This consortium is the largest international organisation in the field of open education. Hundreds of educational institutions and similar organisations that share course material freely via the internet are affiliated to the consortium. The awards will be presented at the annual Open Education Consortium conference, which this year will take place in Banff, Alberta, Canada, between 22 and 24 April.

Free online courses
The Open Education Consortium presents three awards for free open online courses (open MOOCs). ‘Open’ means that the material may be used by third parties (for non-commercial purposes). Two of these awards have been won by TU Delft.

Solving Complex Problems, by Alexander de Haan, is about Complex Multi Actor Systems, ‘spaghetti situations’ in which everything appears to be interlinked and many factors influence each other. Consider, for example, a situation in which new energy technology is introduced into an existing energy market. In such situations, people often talk about solutions, but nobody is exactly sure what the question is, or the best solution. Quantitative and qualitative models can help people understand such complex issues. Course participants will acquire practical tools and methods with which to structure and analyse complex problems.

Delft Design Approach, by Jaap Daalhuizen, has also received an Award of Excellence in the ‘Open MOOC’ category. The Delft Design Approach is a structured approach that helps designers cope with complex design projects – from the formulation of a strategic vision and mapping users and their contexts to developing and selecting meaningful designs for products and services. TU Delft hopes that this MOOC will introduce participants to its own unique approach to design, using several models and design methods, and drawing upon the knowledge and experience of experts from both education and practice. The online course allows participants to compare their results with those of students studying on campus at Delft and designers from the profession.

OpenCourseWareThe Human Controller, by David Abbink, is a course in the Mechanical Engineering Master’s degree programme. The course material (video lectures, exercises, articles, exam questions, etc.) is freely available as OpenCourseWare (OCW) on the internet. The Open Education Consortium has awarded the course as an ‘Outstanding (OCW) Course’.
The course studies man’s abilities and limits with regard to controlling machines. Various human sensors are explained, and participants learn how muscles work and how movement is coordinated. Man’s ability to control is explained within the context of control technology – a tricky subject that is made somewhat easier by considering examples from the practical situation. Two of the course assignments involve students doing their own experiments to demonstrate that the theory also applies to them. In one of these projects, the students download software that requires them to follow a moving dot with their mouse. This game allows the students to experience just how difficult it can be to control different types of systems, and teaches them how to measure their own control behaviour and construct mathematical models.

Sharing knowledge
TU Delft considers sharing knowledge with the rest of the world to be one of its core tasks. It has therefore been publishing course material online as OpenCourseWare since 2007. Some 150 courses have now been published, which are visited by 1,500 people per day.
TU Delft has been offering MOOCs free of charge to anyone with internet access since September 2013. Up until now, the courses have reached more than 350,000 people across the globe. At present, TU Delft is running 17 MOOCs. The MOOCs at TU Delft stand out because they are totally open (i.e. published under a free or open licence), which means that the material may be used by third parties for non-commercial purposes.

Learn about urban water services, focusing on conventional technologies for drinking water treatment.
This course focuses on conventional technologies for drinking water treatment. Unit processes, involved in the treatment chain, are discussed as well as the physical, chemical and biological processes involved. The emphasis is on the effect of treatment on water quality and the dimensions of the unit processes in the treatment chain. After the course one should be able to recognise the process units, describe their function, and make basic calculations for a preliminary design of a drinking water treatment plant.

Introduction to Credit Risk Management

What is credit risk? Why is it so important, in modern economies, to correctly deal with it? This course combines theory with practice to answer these questions.

You are a bank and a big part of your daily business is to lend money. Unfortunately for you, lending money is definitely a risky activity: there is no 100% guarantee that you will get all your money back. For example you may expect losses in your portfolio because of the default of your counterpart. Or, in a less extreme situation, the credit quality of your counterpart may deteriorate according to some rating system, so that your loan becomes more and more risky. These are typical situations in which credit risk manifests itself. According to the Basel Agreements, credit risk is one of the three fundamental risks, together with market risk and operational risk, a bank (or another regulated financial institution) has to face when operating on the markets. As the 2008 financial crisis has shown us, a correct understanding of credit risk and the ability to cope with it are fundamental in the world of today. The aim of this course is to provide an introduction to credit risk modeling and hedging. At the end of the course, the students will be able to understand and correctly use the basic tools of credit risk management, both from a theoretical and, most of all, a practical point of view. This will be a quite unconventional course. For every methodology, we will analyze its points of strengths, but we will also stress its points of weakness. We will try to do this in a rigorous way, but also with fun. In addition to the video lectures and exercises, recent economic developments will be discussed in the forum based on news articles, and key practitioners from the financial world will share their views through interviews.

As fossil-based fuels and raw materials contribute to climate change, the use of renewable materials and energy as an alternative is in full swing. This transition is not a luxury, it is has become a necessity. We can use the unique properties of microorganisms to convert organic waste streams into biomaterials, chemicals and biofuels. This course provides the insights and tools for biotechnological processes design in a sustainable way. Five experienced course leaders will teach you the basics of industrial biotechnology and how to apply these to the design of fermentation processes for the production of fuels, chemicals and foodstuffs. Throughout the course, you will be challenged to design your own biotechnological process and evaluate its performance and sustainability.

Solving Complex Problems

Solving Complex Problems addresses complex multi-actor systems; so called ‘spaghetti situations’ in which everything is connected to everything, and everything influences everything. Situations, for instance, in which innovative new energy technologies emerge into the existing energy system. Or new health technology, medicine, treatments or screening technologies are being developed and society has to decide about whether they should be allowed and what they may cost.

Open Education Week’s goal is to raise awareness about free and open educational opportunities. At TU Delft we want to highlight how open education can help people meet their goals in education, whether that’s to develop skills and knowledge for work, supporting formal studies, learning something new for personal interest, or looking for additional teaching resources. Therefore, starting March 9th, we kick off the Open Education Week 2015. The perfect opportunity for (teaching) staff and students to discover more about the possibilities of online and open education. During the Open Education Week we organize several activities about open and online education. For instance, there will be a research seminar on Monday, a carousel with speakers from TU Delft and other institutions, workshops and a debate on the 12th.

Monday March 9th: Education Seminar: Open EducationDuring the education seminar both our E-dean of Open & Online Education, one of the board members of the Open Education Consortium and lecturers of TU Delft and other HE institutions will shed their light on sharing and reusing Educational resources and the impact of Online education on campus | More info

Wednesday, March 11th: Visit the New Media CentreSign up for a tour to the New Media Centre, catch a glimpse of the recording studios, learn how to prepare for recording learning videoclips (short workshop) and find out everything you want to know about the services the New Media Centre can provide | More info

If you are around at TU Delft don’t hesitate to register for one or more of the activities. And if you’re interested, you might also want to have a look at the Global Open Education Week website, listing all activities organised worldwide.

This course introduces the basic components of an airframe structure and discusses their use and limitations. The realities of composite design such as the effect of material scatter, environmental knockdowns, and damage knockdowns are discussed and guidelines accounting for these effects and leading to robust designs are presented. The resulting design constraints and predictive tools are applied to real-life design problems in composite structures. A brief revision of lamination theory and failure criteria leads into the development of analytical solutions for typical failure modes for monolithic skins (layup strength, buckling under combined loads and for a variety of boundary conditions) and stiffeners (strength, column buckling under a variety of loads and boundary conditions, local buckling or crippling for one-edge and no-edge-free conditions). These are then combined into stiffened composite structures where additional failure modes such as skin-stiffener separation are considered. Analogous treatment of sandwich skins examines buckling, wrinkling, crimping, intra-cellular buckling failure modes. Once the basic analysis and design techniques have been presented, typical designs (e.g. flange layup, stiffness, taper requirements) are presented and a series of design guidelines (stiffness mismatch minimization, symmetric and balanced layups, 10% rule, etc.) addressing layup and geometry are discussed. On the metal side, the corresponding design practices and analysis methods are presented for the more important failure modes (buckling, crippling) and comparisons to composite designs are made. A design problem is given in the end as an application of the material in this part of the course.

A new course Next Generation Infrastructures part 1 has been published, the course is a former MOOC from the faculty Technology, Policy and Management: http://bit.ly/Z4ad2i

Infrastructures for energy, water, transport, information and communications services create the conditions for livability and economic development. They are the backbone of our society. Similar to our arteries and neural systems that sustain our human bodies, most people however take infrastructures for granted. That is, until they break down or service levels go down.

In many countries around the globe infrastructures are ageing. They require substantial investments to meet the challenges of increasing population, urbanization, resource scarcity, congestion, pollution, and so on. Infrastructures are vulnerable to extreme weather events, and therewith to climate change.
Technological innovations, such as new technologies to harvest renewable energy, are one part of the solution. The other part comes from infrastructure restructuring. Market design and regulation, for example, have a high impact on the functioning and performance of infrastructures.

This course will help you to understand the complexity of infrastructure systems. Complexity is one of key words of this course and we will describe the tremendous implications for the design and governance of infrastructure systems. Part II of the MOOC NGI (September/Otober 2014) will have a more applied nature: the focus will be on smart, secure and sustainable infrastructures ( smart grids, eco cities, ICT/big data &performance of infrastructures and asset management).

This course discusses fundamental traffic flow characteristics and traffic flow variables. Their definitions are presented, and visualization/analysis techniques are discussed and empirical facts are presented. The empirical relation between the flow variables and the bottleneck capacity analysis are discussed. Shockwave analysis and a review of macroscopic traffic flow models are presented. Traffic flow stability issues are discussed as well as numerical solution approaches. The lectures also show how macroscopic models are derived from microscopic principles. This course provides an overview of human factors relevant for the behavior of drivers. The car-following model and other approaches to describe the lateral driving task will be discussed. The lectures also pertains to general gap acceptance modeling and lane changing. Microscopic models for pedestrian flow behavior are discussed and an in depth discussion of microscopic simulation models will be presented. The study goals of this course are to gain insight into theory and modeling of traffic flow operations, to learn to apply theory and mathematical models to solve practical problems and to gain experience with using simulation programs for ex-ante assessment studies.
Keywords:Traffic flow, Fundamental Diagram, Pedestrian flow, Lane Changing, car-following model, Shockwave theory , lateral driving task.

In April the OpenCourseWare Consortium organized the annual OCWC Global conference, this time in the beautiful city of Ljubljana. After winning two awards in 2013 , TU Delft was lucky enough to have been awarded no less then 4 awards this year:

Anka Mulder (vice president education & operations and former president of the OpenCourseWare Consortium) was granted the Leadership Award

Also, the OpenCourseWare Consortium announced a name change and will from now on carry the name ‘Open Education Consortium’. This name change resembles the widening of focus for the consortium from educational resources towards education and therewith better suits the globally changing interests of institutions.

As you might have noticed, last week the Open Education Week took place. Worldwide numerous institutions organized uncountable activities to celebrate open education. So did TU Delft.

Recently TU Delft launched an innovation programme for Open & Online Education, which should ultimately result in the establishment of the Delft Extension School. In the Open Education Week we organized three activities to raise awareness for these developments among colleagues and students. With 136 participants in total and many enthusiastic reactions, the activities proved to be quite a success. below you’ll find an overview of the activities we organised:

MOOC Workshop, Thursday March 13th
Dr. Arno Smets, one of our first MOOC teachers, shared his experience on the development of his MOOC and inspired many fellow teachers to think about Open and Online Education.Visit the webpage to watch and download the presentation

edX Hackathon, Friday, March 14th
Finally, Friday March 14th, we organised an edX Hackathon, at which students thought up and started programming new functionalities for the edX platform.

During the entire week, the campus was decorated with Campus grafiti and banners, to raise awareness for the Open Education Week.

Last, but certainly not least, TU Delft has been awarded with this years Orange Carpet Award for DelftX MOOCs at the NUFFIC annual conference.

All in all, we are very content about the Open Education Week 2014 and we’re looking forward to the coming years in which we will further shape TU Delft Open & Online Education. To keep you informed about these developments, starting next month, we will organise a traveling Open Education Café: every month members of the Open Education Team will be available to ask questions, drink coffee and discuss Open & Online Education.